Kos has been exploring core values of the Democrats over the past few days. While I commend the effort, I feel there's an essential aspect missing.

Coming late to this -- I've found most of the DKos atmosphere a bit abrasive and tesosterone-driven of late and have in general stayed away -- I've missed the discussion (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) so let's just cut to the chase: the grand conclusions:

Maybe it's just me, but I find "privacy" to be a very weak frame for a woman's sovereignty over her own body. "Privacy" suggests secrets. I don't see the issue as being about keeping secrets, but a matter of having control.

I consider a woman's control over her own body a matter of freedom from enslavement. I think we've fallen into a big trap by getting into debating "abortion," as if that were the issue. It's not. If you're against abortion, don't have one. A lot of people would never have an abortion. That's their own choice. But that does not mean that they automatically support State control over one's body.

If the state can force a woman to remain pregnant, then it becomes the state's decision, and that means, under the same premise:

The State can force an abortion

The State can sterilize people (including use of castration)

The State can regulate all behavior of pregnant women

The State can impose its will on people's bodies for other reasons

It's the stepping stone to eugenics. For example, what if the State decides it has a compelling interest to have people who have "the gay gene" sterilized? What if the State decides there are enough Hispanics in this country? What if decided that "welfare mothers" were too expensive and so mandated sterilization?

Are we going to lock up a pregnant woman if she lights a cigarette? Are we going to have pregnancy officers doing home checks to make sure pregnant women are eating their vegetables?

Should the State mandate vassectomies for men who do poorly in college or fail to pass the Presidential Physical Fitness tests?

Shall we hold criminal trials to determine the guilt or innocence of women who've miscarried? Shall men be arrested for masturbating and spilling precious seed?

Should we have political vetting so only the "good people" can reproduce? Should the State set up matchmaking programs so people with lower intelligence breed to produce workers to do grunt work?

You don't have to be "pro-abortion" in order to have some very strong reservations about the State's power over our bodies.

Apparently children's education hasn't declined enough, so now the conservatives in the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor-HHS-Education and Related Agencies have eliminated funding for children's programming in PBS and local public television stations.

Lawson continued: “The proposed elimination of funding for Ready To Learn, a vital educational program that serves tens of millions of American kids, is nothing short of punitive.” Ready To Learn is an innovative early learning partnership between PBS, local public television stations and the U.S. Department of Education. Ready To Learn integrates, at no cost to consumers, commercial-free children’s educational television and online resources with community outreach to help parents and educators prepare young children for success in school. Award-winning Ready To Learn television programs include Arthur, DragonTales, Clifford, Between the Lions, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Maya & Miguel, and Postcards from Buster.

Lawson continued: “In previous years, the highly successful Ready To Learn program received strong bipartisan support. Even the Bush Administration appreciates the benefits of this program and recommended level funding of $23 million. So, there clearly was no cost-cutting mandate that would justify what the subcommittee did today.” Postcards from Buster, a series funded through Ready To Learn, was the subject of controversy earlier this year.

A former co-chairman of the Republican National Committee is the leading candidate to take over the agency that funds public broadcasting, sparking new concerns among broadcasters about conservative influence over National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service programming.

Patricia de Stacy Harrison, a high-ranking official at the State Department, is one of two candidates for the top job at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is the favored candidate of the CPB's chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, according to people close to the search. The CPB is a congressionally chartered agency that directs taxpayer funds to PBS, NPR and hundreds of radio and TV stations.

So what's the big deal?

Harrison, who has been assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs since October 2001, did not return calls seeking comment. She has been an entrepreneur (she founded with her husband and later sold a Washington lobbying and public relations firm, E. Bruce Harrison Co., that specialized in representing companies with environmental issues), but has no experience in public broadcasting.

Harrison has been appointed to jobs in the State and Commerce departments by President George H.W. Bush and the current President Bush. She was co-chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1997 until January 2001, helping to raise money for Republican candidates, including George W. Bush.

Not only that, she's an advocate of the fake news reports the White House has been putting out as pro-government propaganda:

In her State Department role, Harrison has praised the work of the department's Office of Broadcasting Services, which in early 2002 began producing feature reports, some coordinated by the White House, that promoted the administration's arguments for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The reports were distributed free to domestic and international TV stations. In testimony before Congress last year, Harrison said the Bush administration regarded these "good news" segments as "powerful strategic tools" for swaying public opinion.

I don't see how anybody can see such overt politicizing of public broadcasting as a good thing. Is PBS to become the mouthpiece for the party who happens to be in power at the time? What's more, do our children really need to miss out on what's been a terrific alternative source of learning, just to pacify political vendettas?

"The government shouldn't be in broadcasting anyway. Leave it to the free market," some will say. But when it comes to our kids, the alternatives to Sesame Street are first-person shooters. Now instead of watching Big Bird, our kids will learn how to shoot him. Just lovely.

I think that just about everyone has known -- or at least strongly suspected -- that corruption can run pretty deep in Washington, DC. But who could've thought up the idea to corrupt the corruption?

Not only have the radical organizers of the Republican party managed to redefine grassroots politics, they also seem to have taken over the smoke-filled rooms as well.

For over ten years, but particularly since George W. Bush took office, powerful Republicans, among them Tom DeLay and Senator Rick Santorum, of Pennsylvania, have been carrying out what they call the "K Street Project," an effort to place more Republicans and get rid of Democrats in the trade associations and major national lobbying organizations that have offices on K Street in downtown Washington (although, of course, some have offices elsewhere).

The Republican purge of K Street is a more thorough, ruthless, vindictive, and effective attack on Democratic lobbyists and other Democrats who represent businesses and other organizations than anything Washington has seen before. The Republicans don't simply want to take care of their friends and former aides by getting them high-paying jobs: they want the lobbyists they helped place in these jobs and other corporate representatives to arrange lavish trips for themselves and their wives; to invite them to watch sports events from skyboxes; and, most important, to provide a steady flow of campaign contributions. The former aides become part of their previous employers' power networks. Republican leaders also want to have like-minded people on K Street who can further their ideological goals by helping to formulate their legislative programs, get them passed, and generally circulate their ideas. When I suggested to Grover Norquist, the influential right-wing leader and the leading enforcer of the K Street Project outside Congress, that numerous Democrats on K Street were not particularly ideological and were happy to serve corporate interests, he replied, "We don't want nonideological people on K Street, we want conservative activist Republicans on K Street."

I'm truly surprised, and yet not surprised one bit, that the American mainstream media have largely ignored the Downing Street Secret Memo.

What Downing Street Secret Memo? you ask? The one written after British/US meetings long before the War on Iraq, that says this:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

This is the internal British government memo that blew up in the face of Tony Blair. It outlines how Bush had already decided to invade Iraq and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Let's look at that again.

"The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

In other words, Bush and his cohorts "fixed" the facts to back up their policy intentions. In plain talk, they lied to us. But wait, there's more:

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

Ramp up before the elections, to make all the politicos look tough, but start the mess afterwards.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors.

What? "WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran"? So obviously WMD was not the real justification. Maybe regime change and the humanitarian cause was the real reason to invade. Oh, wait....

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: selfdefence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.

And yet we had people in this country voting for Bush because they thought Saddam was going to bomb West Virginia. How did they get that idea?

Now we have over 1600 American soldiers killed in Iraq. Over 12,000 have been wounded, some very seriously. Why? Not terrorism -- Iraq was a military dictatorship, not an al-Qaeda host. Not self defense -- with his old tanks and archaic short-range missiles, Saddam couldn't attack us if he wanted to. Not regime change -- there was "no legal base" for that.

We always knew that Bush and especially Cheney were hell-bent on getting revenge on Saddam as soon as they got into the White House. Their own staffers have admitted that. But here's a high-level government document that clearly states that Bush had already decided to go to war long before the weapons inspections were anywhere near completed.

In the article linked above, David Benjamin discusses the takeover of the Republican Party by the "Religious Right" and their tendency to label everyone on the left as "secular". He makes some excellent points, but offers no solutions. I'm going to see if I can't develop a little strategic opposition to the advancing theocratic movement.

George Lakoff is the go-to guy for this, obviously, but I'm still not seeing "our side" using talking points and framing as effectively as the Right. We've got to get on with it, before a Christian Autocracy silences its opposition for good.

The first phrase we need to learn comes from Benjamin's article: Christianism should be used to distinguish between Christianity, or the teachings of Christ, and the conservative political machine that promotes it's fascist, elitist, pro-corporation agenda under the guise of religiosity. It's painfully obvious that their agenda has nothing to do with the values or teachings of Jesus. The Prince of Peace would hardly be on the side of war for profit and the "divine right of capital".

Next, we have to call them what they really are: the Conservative Elite. The Left is comprised of many, varied groups. Certainly there are professors and scientists among us, but there are also laborers, Ministers, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, Islamists, Christians, women, gays, straights, Blacks, Hispanics, Natives and immigrants, with a sprinkling of Hollywood-types who naturally get most of the press but are hardly the majority in our number. Most of the money in this country is controlled by the Right. They are far more likely to have an Ivy League education and a lot of their money is older than the Republic itself. Don't buy into the bullshit that G.W. Bush is a "regular guy". The Bush family is as elite as it gets, and their money old enough to have come mostly from Hitler's own coffers.

The best available estimates are that 100,000 Iraqi citizens have been killed since the U.S. invasion. Let's add to that the tens of thousands who died in Afghanistan, and the millions slaughtered in Darfur without our intervention because we're occupied elsewhere. Then there are the 1600 or so of our bravest young men and women who have died for Halliburton's bottom line. Let's look at the fact that Bush executed more prisoners than any governor in history, and without proper review of the cases. Why the hell are we letting them get away with calling it a "culture of life"? Bush's Slaughter of the Innocents is more like it, when you consider many on Texas' death row were just that, as were the women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're killing people every day who never harmed an American. We've become a Culture of Death

The Conservatives are not "pro-life" - they would allow a sick woman to die in labor to protect a fetus; they have executed the wrong people; they stand in the way of science that could save the lives and alleviate suffering for millions of people. There's no expression of concern or empathy for suffering in them. Their primary motivation seems to be the punishment of women who have sex outside of marriage, though not all who might seek to terminate a pregnancy are single. While they claim to defend the life of the fetus, their real agenda is to control women's sexuality. The salient point that rarely gets a headline is that Women are People, Not Property.

Before we even consider the concept of a Slave Birth, why don't we try taking care of the kids we already have? There are three million homeless kids in this country right now. An unwanted child is more likely to suffer abuse, neglect and poverty, and Freaknomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side of Everything, by Steve D. Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, showed that the drop in the crime rate corresponds to the legalization of abortion. Society benefits when its children are loved and wanted.

How about we make our own label? Pro-Constitutionists has a nice ring to it, as do Liberal Patriots and Jeffersonians. The Pro-American, Pro-Democracy Left needs to stand up and point out that the Subversives on the Radical Right are undermining America's foundations, endangering her people and ruining our reputation in the world.

We used to be the good guys. We were the champions of human rights and civil liberties. We were all about fairness and innovation and creativity. Now our image around the world will forever be associated with the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. "Cowboy Diplomacy" is the derrogatory term others use to describe our foreign policy. American elections, which used to be a beacon of hope in the world, are now a laughing stock. Do we really want greed, incompetence and callous disregard for life to be the American Legacy in the 21st Century?

Every generation has its Prophets of Doom. Instead of standing on a street corner with a sign that says "the end is near", they are sitting in the White House and the Pentagon, trying to make sure all the players are in place for Armaggedon. Personally, I'd prefer to have people in charge who are motivated to prevent the end of the world rather than hasten it.

I feel like a broken record. I write the same things on different days in different ways, but its all the same. The news is all bad and we need a majority to make a difference, but we'll never get one when elections are stolen from us. How do we reach people who don't read at all, let alone read blogs? How do you educate a person who scoffs at the educated? How do you condense American History to a soundbite so people will remember it? I'm watching my country become a fascist state, and I feel powerless to stop it.

The irony of it all is that the Left is pro-religion. We're loving, tolerant people. We love freedom, humanity and truth. There are a few among us who don't practice a religion, and that's OK with us, too. We're easy to get along with, and that's part of the problem. We want to be reasonable, but we're dealing with people who abhor rational thought. We've been trying to get along while they've been taking over. If we're ever going to fight back, now is the time. Learn these terms and use them. Come up with more and leave them in comments. Spread them around.